Show HN: I built a website for sharing salary info - <AUTHOR> https://www.fellowage.io/?r=hn <comment><USER3> Four obvious questions:

1\. How is this different to Glassdoor?

2\. How do you get enough data points to be useful?

3\. How do you account for selection bias?

4., (and here's the big one) how do you account for the mistruths of self- reported income?

The last one is the big problem with all self-reported income summaries. One thing I've learned over the year is that people lie, even anonymously. I'm not even sure why. Do they really believe it? Are they posting it to make themselves feel good? I really don't know. But I do know that I don't believe your salary claim until I see a W2.

As for selection bias, this is a big one too. Take a company like Google. At level 7+ data point get pretty thin. This is partially because there aren't that many but the real problem is that these people really have no motivation to share. So you don't really see the big outliers.

Lastly, most of these aren't clear on what number they are report and what users should report. Is it base salary? What about bonus? What about RSUs/options?

As anyone who has worked in big tech knows, base salary number are almost completely useless. Salary band is defined by level (pretty tightly, in my experience). More than 50% of your total compensation will come from bonus and stock and stock in particular has massive variance.

<comment><USER4> Does question #1 really need to be asked? Glassdoor has lost its impartiality through solicitation of corporate money and influence, and imo can no longer be trusted. The scene is ripe for competition now.

<comment><USER5> We had a Glassdoor sales guy contact HR after a negative review to sell us a paid option to "improve" our profile. My trust in them since then is below zero.

<comment><USER3> Ah the Yelp business model.

<comment><USER6> I, like you, used to flippantly accuse Yelp of extortion. It's always easy to believe the worst. Then someone here on HN provided several helpful articles that gave me pause and helped me update my point of view.

Yelp themselves have addressed this with a dedicated page: [https://www.yelp.com/extortion](https://www.yelp.com/extortion)

Maybe I've been duped. I'd be curious if your comment is based on different research, or personal experience.

<comment><USER7> I have a few friends who own restaurants. Yelp extortion is real. i've seen it myself. Yelp denying it is obvious, who'd admit to it?

They do not "manipulate" ratings, sure... They just take a _looong_ time to "Review" positive reviews, and not too long to "Review" negative reviews you get. And, of course, only reviews they have "reviewed can be shown and count towards your average score...

<comment><USER8> All these claims are publicly testable using web archives to build stats about review approval speed. Did you verify these claims?

<comment><USER9> >All these claims are publicly testable using web archives

I'm confused about how you think this would work.

1\. Yelp doesn't report on its approval speed.

2\. To get an accurate report on this, you would have to have several accounts posting positive and negative reviews on the same pages. Yelp doesn't allow this and would ban the accounts.

3\. Yelp explicitly disallows scraping their site (i.e. having a bot archive the pages). Doing so would be thwarted by their anti-bot measures. It's also against their TOS.[0]

Do you have web archives that can be used to build these stats?

[0]: [https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape- da...](https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Can-I-copy-or-scrape-data-from- the-Yelp-site?l=en_US)

<comment><USER8> For starters, i don't even have to give you any hints because if you're claiming somebody's doing extortion you better have some good evidence.

1\. You don't need that to demonstrate statistically significant difference between paying and non-paying customers

2\. You don't need to make any accounts, only read existing and incoming data

3\. Yes, you shouldn't break TOS but you also shouldn't be throwing around unsubstantiated accusations of extortion

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As lots of commenters mentioned, this is a nice try, but human (and corporate) nature dooms it.

The only way to make this kind of thing work, is to legislate salary transparency.

That may seem to disincentivize individual excellence (by removing the rewards), but I'd say that it's OK to pay Bob more than Joe, as long as you are willing to justify that increase in wages. As a manager, I had to fight like hell to get promotions and increases for my team, so I always had this information handy.

The other way to incentivize excellence and effort is through bonuses, but these could easily become opaque, thus, continuing the issue.

In academia, salaries tend to be [relatively] low, so perks become the currency.

Human nature dictates that we always want to be "better than" our peers (thus making them "not-peers"). We always seem to find ways to do end-runs around the system.

I'm fairly glad to be out of the corporate rat-race. I'm doing my own thing, making less than I ever have, and loving every minute of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually. And as others have pointed out, in some countries you can call tax office and ask how much another person has earned in the last year.

And I do believe that every company needs to get very transparent on how they decide the salary, when they pay someone differently. There should be a well- designed set of rules and processes to follow. This way, people who want to earn more, know exactly what to do and in which direction should they grow and develop. Also, if they think that this direction doesn't align with their personal goals, they can make a better decision about joining another company, where interests will align better.

<comment><USER11> > Legislating salary transparency would be quite awesome actually.

I've heard they do this in one or more Scandinavian countries. Essentially, you can go online and see what your coworkers and neighbors earn.

I have a feeling that's why salaries in these countries, especially when you include state defined insurance and pension plans, are so normalized. It's probably also why more innovation tends to take place in the US (subjectively).

For many of us in the US, I think this would actually be a net negative, myself included. There is so much division in this country, eventually employers will simply be forced to dish out nearly identical salaries for everyone in order to avoid lawsuits and government penalties, even when talent and performance is radically different between employees.

For example, Employee X has a BS in CS from a great engineering school which took a lot of effort to obtain. He was hacking away at code on his own as a teenager and is passionate about tech, and is often working on open source projects on weekends and evenings.

Another employee comes in - she got a watered-down "Information Systems" degree from some mediocre pay-to-play online school, and her previous knowledge of technology is her IPhone and Facebook. She pays her tutition fees, does the minimum to graduate, and now has her BS, too.

She discovers the talented guy make 50% more than her, even though he's the guy leading the development projects, ensuring standards are met, cleaning up the garbage produced by other junior coders, etc. We all know that many teams form this dynamic, especially in typical contracting and enterprise shops.

Well of course she'll complain. They both have similar 'credentials' on paper, both work 40 hours, both are in their 30s. Management won't care that one dev is worth 5x the other, they want to avoid lawsuits and government penalties. So his salary is lowered, hers is raised. Because he knows he won't get paid what he's worth anywhere else since it's the same everywhere, he just stop performing at work, the whole project suffers.

And yes, this has happened in my work place several times in the last few years as salaries have become more transparent and there are more complaints from groups who feel that they're being discriminated against, regardless of their performance and experience.

<comment><USER10> You are correct, which is why I think a bonus system would work better.

The problem with bonuses, is that they are very easy to abuse, and many corporations have incredibly rigid bonus systems that actually make it difficult to reward individual excellence.

I was just talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. He's a Director at a manufacturing plant, and is awesome.

He spent the last year, working 7 days a week, ten hours a day, to implement some new processes. The company is being put out to bid for sale, and his efforts doubled the price.

His efforts alone.

Doubled the price of the company.

He got a tiny raise, and all Directors get the same bonus, based on sales numbers (which weren't so good). Also, all Directors get the same percentage of equity.

I suspect that he may be seeing who else could use his talents...

<comment><USER12> Working that hard for someone else is stupid. Unless you hold the reins, I wouldn't expect management to suddenly have their hearts grow 10 times larger at the expense of their own compensation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with this. No matter how much I love the company, their mission, or people I work with, it's not healthy to work 7 days a week and 10h a day for the company that you are not an owner of. Boundaries between job and life are flexible, but not as much.

I'd rather spend 10h a day 7 days a week pouring efforts into my own assets, or towards my vision, and not for someone else's assets or vision, especially if I have no say and stake in the high level decisions (like sale of the company).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So against my better judgment I signed up and shared information. Now that you have my data, not only is my account is in a "pending" status, but I can't log in because I get an (obviously incorrect) error that the user doesn't exist.

Pretty godawful experience from the start, since the _only_ reason I added my information was to see if there was anything relevant since I do not live or work in a tech hub (quite the opposite).

Edit: And it seems like you need to search for companies in order to see them. Browsing companies to see if I recognize any in my area would be a good feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> The user account does not exist yet for pending registrations. It gets created only when registration is accepted.

Also, if rejected registration is not updated with correct info in 1 week, it gets automatically deleted. This data does not become part of the information that other users can see.

> Browsing companies to see if I recognize any in my area would be a good > feature.

You are not the first asking for that today. I'll implement this feature for the next release.

> the only reason I added my information was to see if there was anything > relevant

That also screams like a missing feature for me. I could allow people to browse companies (by location) and show masked data until they sign up and share their own entry.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I have implemented the company browsing feature

2\. I have made it available without signup/login (partially—you'll see companies/locations and how many entries they have each, and be able to navigate to these company pages, but from there to see numbers, you'd need to signup/login).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this different from the database of salaries that other services such as Glassdoor already offer?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, Glassdoor shows only averages and statistical distributions and doesn't show separate salary entries. It doesn't satisfy the questions and fears that I have set out to solve.

e.g., "Who should I look up to in my company to earn more?" or "How up-to-date are specific salary entries?"

My product doesn't answer the first question just yet, but it will in the future via a peer-to-peer sharing feature that I'm planning in the next version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can you enforce a threshold of entries for a certain role after which you start displaying the salary? And then only display it as a range with information about the quartiles?

Otherwise it's not so anonymous. Sometimes the combination of role and Salary is enough to point to a single employee. That's precisely the reason why you only get statistical information at the other sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is a pseudo-anonymization. Someone with enough information can always say: "Oh, I believe this is your salary entry."

On the other hand, it's not provable (I don't save the exact number, and I separate the account and wage entry securely so that the user and only user can realize that connection: [https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured- the-privacy-an...](https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the-privacy- and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb)).

If I apply replace entries with statistical ranges, then the product would become a clone of other products for this (like Glasdoor, LinkedIn Salary, etc.). And it won't solve the problems I set out to solve with it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> # The problem:

I have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only guessing what my colleagues might be earning. This issue is especially problematic in cultures and countries in which talking about wage numbers is an unspoken taboo among the employees.

Quite often, the questions like "Should I ask for a raise?, or am I already earning maximum that my employer can handle?" "Am I earning too much for the work that I do?, or am I underpaid?" "Who should I look up to and learn what they are doing to get a higher salary?" have plagued my mind.

# Existing solutions:

Of course, there are services where you can look at salary levels or statistical distributions of wages. The problem with them is that they don't give you specific (albeit anonymized) numbers of what individuals earn, and they don't satisfy nagging feelings of fear and anxiety that I have mentioned above. Also, it's hard to tell whether the numbers are up-to-date or not.

# The solution:

I designed this product to be privacy-first so that many more users feel comfortable sharing their wage information and keeping it up-to-date. It allows users to see all salary entries in their current company, search for other companies in preparation for negotiations. Here is the full list of features:

\- I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles

\- I nudge users to update their info twice a year

\- I keep information quality high

\- You keep your data anonymous

\- You can see your and other companies data

\- You can subscribe for updates for particular job titles/companies

# Plans for the next version:

I plan to allow users to share their non-anonymized information in an encrypted peer-to-peer fashion with each other if they want to. This answers the question like, "Oh, somebody earns twice as much as me… And has the same job title… Who is that?"

Tell me what you think about it! Is there something missing from your perspective?

<comment><USER16> > I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles

Lost me right there. Good luck with that. LinkedIn is notoriously a garbage dump of spam, recruiters and fake profiles. That's on top of the fact that most people (myself included) don't have a LinkedIn profile to begin with in order to curb spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think would be an alternative tool to verify that people enter real job titles, company names and location?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unfortunately, as there is no way to vet submitted information on these kinds of platforms, their use is pretty limited. Some employer can just go about submitting false salary data in order to appear more appealing.

This works the other way around too, someone who was not hired, some ex- employee with some gripe against their previous employer, a misbehaving competitor... Just about anyone can go about submitting false reviews about your company in order to damage your employer-brand.

<comment><USER18> I've heard of places where HR requires you to write a (probably) glowing Glassdoor review during onboarding. Or severance which is conditioned on not writing a negative review.

Goodhart's Law at work.

<comment><USER19> Easy enough: Write the glowing review, then contact Glassdoor and report your company. I'm fairly sure Glassdoor would then remove _all_ the reviews.

<comment><USER20> No, they'd offer the company to remove the negative review for a fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you plan to go global don´t repeat glassdoor mistake (or is it on purpose?). In countries where inflation rate is big (like 30-50% a year) salary info that is not tied to the date the worker was perceiving it, its mostly useless. Same happens with average salary reports, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm keeping and showing how old the entry is. Additionally, I plan to notify users to update their information every half a year, since their last update. If they don't update in one year, I plan to hide, or remove their information automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Even a website operator, with direct access to the database, can't see who is the owner of your salary entry.

I'm curious about this given you can update/delete your salary entry - <USER2> there not have to be a unique identifier between the account and the entry?

<comment><AUTHOR> Read more on how I've done it here: [https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i- ensured-the-privacy-an...](https://dev.to/foundsiders/how-have-i-ensured-the- privacy-and-anonymity-of-my-website-users-5fgb)

SPOILER: asymmetric encryption with private/public keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I never understood the kind of culture where salaries are secret. How good is that? In academia you know exactly how much everybody earns (it's determined by your tenure status) and nobody makes a fuss about it.

<comment><USER24> Turns out you answered your own question in the sentence after you asked it.

You don't ever want your pay tied to seniority. You want it based on the value you can deliver. That way, you with your 10 years of experience and proven ability to ship good products get to make twice as much as Senior Dev John with 10 years experience maintaining the internal CRUD app.

<comment><USER25> And then you have a company that wants to keep salaries secret, so they don't have to keep hiring a new person to maintain their internal CRUD app every every 6 months.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure that there are enough people who would be content with such a simple job of maintaining CRUD app. They get less salary, yes, but also they'll have much less stress, and can focus their energy on other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi)

</comment><comment><USER27> "Privacy-focused", but you need to log in with your Linkedin credentials -- what could go wrong?

Thanks, but no thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hold on.

You don't provide LinkedIn credentials in any way to me or to my website. You use it to authorize with LinkedIn (similar way, you can authorize with Facebook, Github, Google, Twitter, and other OAuth platforms).

The only thing that my website can read (and for very limited amount of time):

\- Your email address, \- First name and last name, \- Unique LinkedIn ID, \- LinkedIn profile photo URL.

That is it. There is no write permission for anything. This authentication token doesn't allow anyone to log in into your LinkedIn account.

This type of technology is called an Authentication Provider, and is used to authenticate you on my website (not on LinkedIn).

Here you can read exactly how I process the data mentioned above: [https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile- data](https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile-data)

<comment><USER28> "Keep your data anonymous"

Even though I personally understand why you are going with Linkedin, you cannot claim that data is anonymous if you require Linkedin account to authenticate. Privacy has nothing to do the with the technical implementation. You are just explaining oAuth but the point is that you already who I am since you require Linkedin. So it is not anonymous. Not for YOU at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not anonymous in a sense that I'm going to see your linkedin profile. I could have found your profile on my own if I wanted to (that's what LinkedIn is for in the first place).

What's important is that I'm not going to see the numbers you entered.

Also, since I'm verifying every registration (in half-automated/half-manual way), and it takes about 20 seconds to do the verification, I cannot possibly remember who I've seen and what profiles do they have. (simply because I'm human).

Additionally, what is important is for what purposes you allow me to process your data. And the only purpose for this LinkedIn data is to verify your company name, job title, and location. Once that is done, the data gets removed or disassociated from your account, which means that it can no longer be meaningfully processed (anonymized), and since I don't have your permission to do any other types of processing—I won't.

EDIT: So what is anonymous are the salary numbers—and that is what I'm talking about on the landing page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I appreciate the focus on security with your multi-layered password feature, but I just clicked out of your tab because none of my passwords are 'secure' enough for you.

No, I don't want to use a password manager.

<comment><USER30> I can't even sign up with a password manager. Says the password is great (even has special chars) but then get an error saying it doesn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was a problem with some special characters (they were not included in validation), and password manager would generate a password that is pretty good, but doesn't have special characters I've initially chosen.

Now, I'm including most special characters, so it should work.

PS: Also, the pre-flight validation now includes special character check too, so you can see the validity real-time instead of after you submit. (This check was not originally included on the client-side, only on the server).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There are some real concerns over the security on this site.. Even in the sandboxes heroku one.

IMO this is not production ready.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please write these concerns to my email alex [at] fellowage [dot] io?

I've used best industry practices for such web apps, and I'm curious what do you think these concerns are!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Doesn't work with Adblock enabled. Adblock by default block shitty cookie popups and without clicking accept i can't log in (and there is no info about mandatory cookie accepting thing).

<comment><USER33> Works for me with ublock origin. FWIW, although I also detest cookie popups (particularly this one, which looks wholly unnecessary), this one is less shitty than most. The customisation page actually looks pretty useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I also detest these popups and "usual" customization pages.

If you think I can improve it even more, please tell me! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like this idea and hope it gains ground. A thing to think about is to work with ranges, in terms of showing a person how much other people earn. I can imagine the system exposing someone at the same level in a relatively small department that they shared such kind of info on your website (if user A simply says but user B earn so much) so any way to "obfuscate" the data would protect everyone.

</comment><comment><USER35> I agree with other comments that Glassdoor sucks, but levels.fyi has done a great job so far. Not sure what this does above and beyond that.

</comment><comment><USER36> The main issue I have with these sites is that they are relatively pointless. The really only are able to cover low and mid level position salaries. Those salaries are not generally very elastic anyway and you can get pretty close to the the salary info from public stats anyway. This makes the site pretty much useless for those jobs.

If you are the Director of AI/Machine learning (or CFO or whatever) at some company there are probably only you or you and one other person that ever had that job. By providing the salary you are outing yourself anyway and risking some sort of action against you. Anyone looking to move into these good jobs has no use for the site either.

This is the real problem glassdoor had/has and why it will eventually disappear or become nothing but ads or headhunter style site.

</comment><comment><USER37> HR won't care at my employer. There is no negotating a salary, there is no asking for a raise. There is a base amount that everyone gets, period, when they hire in and then your annual merit increase (the years we get one) is 0-3% and rarely does anyone even get close to 3%.

All you have to do is ask someone how long they've been here, take the lowest number of the salary range for their position then multiply that by 1.02 or 1.03% for each year they've been here and you've got a pretty good idea of what they make.

Each step up the ladder is a set % too so even if someone gets a higher position (when one rarely opens up, usually when someone quits) you still know about what they are making.

And my parent company employs what, like half a million people... nearly all of which have similar pay brackets.

</comment><comment><USER38> One issue with static data is that it'll rise and fall. Salaries today may be different in the future. You would have to continually receive data to have the latest up to date changes.

Many variables affects the data; age, location, experience, availability, opportunity etc. therefore your data starts to look more like a range, rather than just a number.

In the past, for the same role, company a will only pay this much, whereas company b is willing to negotiate; this is changing.

The problem has already been partially solved. Two companies comes to mind; one stands out by far imo.

</comment><comment><USER39> I surely hope this (or anything similar) catches on, but it's seriously hard to get something like this going.

All the best and thanks for making this.

Btw, demo redirects to a heroku app domain, is this intended?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the demo doesn't have a separate domain setup. Is there a particular issue you see with this? Please tell me if so!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is terrible for distributed companies where putting in my location is a great way to find me.

Also, it doesn't seem to accept EUR as a currency.

<comment><AUTHOR> About distributed companies, do you think an option to enter "Distributed Company" in the location is a good solution for this problem? Then, what happens if company pays vastly differently depending on the country/city?

About currency: It works, when you type the currency, you need to select the entry from the auto-complete. I'm thinking about making it select the currency automatically if only one option matches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Nothing on this page is clickable for me, it seems like the "cookie banner" is invisible and taking up the entire page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using some type of adblocker that blocks cookie banners?

I have coded my own cookie banner and didn't use any of the existing tools out there. That's why I'm surprised if something is blocking it, but there was already another comment about the same as well.

This is to be honest, weird thing for adblocker to do—to block legitimate cookie banner.

And yes, website is not going to work until the required cookie is accepted (my backend rejects requests when they don't specify that the necessary cookie consent was given).

<comment><USER40> Well, I use pi-hole and uBlock Origin. But uBlock doesn't block anything so it must be the pi-hole for some reason?

Do you use some third party script or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> No third-party scripts are used except for Live-Chat. And even that one is only loaded when you click on the Live-Chat button.

Maybe pi-hole doesn't like "cookie-banner" class/id of the cookie banner component?

EDIT: there are some default landen.co scripts (for landing page only), but they are fairly standard and shouldn't be invasive for some extensions to block them…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like the idea. From the demo I could not tell but what measures exist to prevent actors from falsifying information?

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do I need to connect with linked and log in again? Also why are the password rules so absurd? Inb4 [dumb-password-rules]([https://github.com/dumb- password-rules/dumb-password-rules](https://github.com/dumb-password- rules/dumb-password-rules))

<comment><AUTHOR> LinkedIn is used only to verify your information (current job title, company name and location).

Then the password requirements are strong because it is used for encryption of your critical private data in the system. The same reason is why you need to login with your account ID (email) and password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would strongly suggest to add the option of sharing the salary without sharing the company name. Especially in the early adoption phase: People are probably the first one of their company to share their salary. If their position is somewhat unique, it will effectively not be anonymous.

</comment><comment><USER44> There are companies that collect and sale employee information such as "the work number" they provide verification of employment as well as salary. Has anybody taken this kind of data set to answer these questions rather then surveying for bias mis reported data?

</comment><comment><USER19> > Sign up with LinkedIn

I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago and never looked back. They're shady as all hell.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think this should be more "local". I.e. usually I want to know my direct coworkers salary, not necessarily some nation- or corporationwide statistic.

Maybe an app where you scan some QR code, that somebody randomly puts in your break room or so...

<comment><AUTHOR> This idea is quite interesting.

What do you think should this QR code lead to?

Salary information of one particular person (that put the QR code in the room)? Or salaries of group of people who work there?

<comment><USER45> I thought it would "invite" you to a group of shared salaries, where you can add your own, and see statistics about the others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd love to see a place where people could post the cost of benefits that their employers offer them. In my experience this can vary widely and make a huge difference in the compensation package.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hi there. Your page asked to accept cookies twice on Firefox Dev edition.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's probably because of different domains (main production web app, and demo web app)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The site is pretty broken. I tried "USD", "$", etc. and nothing works "Currency Required!" error. and there is no dropdown like claimed on the other comment.

</comment><comment><USER49> the only way to achieve reliability would come from comparing the actual salaries of a set of big enough companies with what their employees have actually volunteered to share and more importantly which ones. Only then you would be able to actually measure how all the human factors are affecting the outcome and then perhaps generalize it to real world. so the issue needs a scientific research, not another zuckerberg.

</comment><comment><USER50> Isn't this the same thing Glassdoor does?

<comment><USER51> Maybe. So what? There are many Ubers, AirBnBs, Googles, etc. Diversity and competition is very valuable for consumers. It keeps innovation moving forward, so I really don't see your point here.

<comment><USER52> It is ironic, how on a post about a website that encourages competition at the employer level for providing fair wages, people are complaining that they don't need competition at the meta-level (salary-sharing websites level).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It shows as a series of images for me under macOS Safari. Nothing responds to clicks, as in, nothing is clickable.

<comment><USER33> Have you dismissed the cookie dialog at the bottom of the page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> In Sweden you can just call the tax office anonymously and ask how much John Doe earned last year.

</comment><comment><USER55> I tried to contribute but CHF is not accepted, it claims xurrency should be filled.

</comment><comment><USER56> > Hi there . I use cookies to make this website work (i.e., signup and login). > Only essential cookies are being used, without which the application won't > work. No ads, no tracking, no pixels, no 3rd-parties involved ...

Per GDRP, you are not required to consent if you only use essential cookies.

> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse > the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the > site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you > are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These > cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not > required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are > necessary should be explained to the user. > [https://gdpr.eu/cookies/](https://gdpr.eu/cookies/)

Nice that you explain (GDPR site recommends that), however preventing interaction with site (and generating confisuion as we see in commenets) is overkill IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thank you. I'm going to take that into account.

On the other hand, I wanted to be super-transparent with my users.

Because, I still see a lot of websites out there having "necessary" cookies, and website works without accepting the popup, and users unknowingly accept "by default" a lot of third-party tracking cookies, which makes me sad :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> meta: people who want to know salaries of their peers and demand equality have a bit a wrong view on companies.

Companies are anything but not about equality, playing fair or being nice to employees. Paying your staff different salaries is crucial and key to run a stable organization. Most won't get why different salaries on the same level create a stable organization, it's complex and would need an extensive/scientific article.

An organization's owner's goal is not to make the individual one happy but rather keeping the entire org on a good track. This involves keeping salaries inequal. Maybe some of you have an educated guess on why inequality creates downright stability.

</comment><comment><USER58> Looks very much like glassdoor to me. Good work though.

</comment><comment><USER59> There's far too many LARPers online for me to take any self reported salary info seriously.

</comment><comment><USER60> levels.fyi is still legit

</comment><comment><USER61> 1) Jokes about child pornography are Not. Funny. Ever. Remove that if you wish to be taken seriously.

2) Every day I read about another database with x million user accounts ending up on the open web. What could possibly go wrong here?

<comment><USER62> Any type of joke can be funny Please do not police what jokes I can enjoy

<comment><USER61> I'm not policing anything. If we've dumbed down to the point where opinions have to be prefaced with the tautological "it's my opinion that..." that's probably something that 90% of posters here should be informed of.

As to your personal freedom to make light of an industry that commercialises the destruction of young lives, I have no interest in that discussion so I refrain from commenting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> "This allows me to keep the quality of the data in FelloWage high."

never heard such bullshit before lmao

<comment><AUTHOR> Possibly I'm wrong somewhere here, but that is a "bullshit" I honestly believe in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I struggle to understand the motivation behind publicly sharing one's own salary, especially with one's own coworkers. It seems to be primarily a movement of low achievers trying to cripple the progress of high achievers, or falsely lay claim to the same rewards as them.

It seems to be a rather meak attempt at collective bargaining without the resolve to collectively organize, and I don't see it working out well for anyone involved.

<comment><USER65> 'primarily a movement of low achievers trying to cripple the progress of high achievers, or falsely lay claim to the same rewards as them.'

People have different negotiating skills and different level of information about job market.

Knowing how much other people get paid for the same job can be an incentive to renegotiate one's salary or change an employer. Removing part of information asymmetry allows to sell your work for the money closer to its real market price.

<comment><USER64> There are too many variables involved to determine a real market price for those in tech product engineering in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER65> And yet that doesn't change anything.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Looking for feedback on my first SaaS website front end design. Be brutal  - <AUTHOR>

I've created a white version and a green version Would value your thoughts and opinions on both versions and what you think works best.
White: http://atlascode.com/staffsquared/home-white.html
Green: http://atlascode.com/staffsquared/home-green.html <comment><USER2> I think a combo of the two would be good.

I like the green nav bar at the top with white logo & links. However I prefer the white body with the grey cityscape dividing the two halves of the body.

I also want to know exactly what your site does within the first 5 seconds.

Both "employee happiness" & "bringing managers/staff together" are benefits. You need to describe WHAT brings those benefits.

So something along the lines of "We bring staff and managers closer together by XYZ..." i.e our simple messaging platform, our real-time chat system etc (or whatever the system is)

It's a nice site! I look forward to checking out your next version.

</comment><comment><USER3> More to the point, the design doesn't tell my what your service actually DOES; some sort of calendaring thing?

The category it's competing in (and thus its feature set) is not obvious to me (a 21yo professional software developer working remotely for an SF company).

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been less focused on what we do and more focused on look and feel up until now. When I'm happy with the overall look then I'll focus on the message that we convey. To answer your question, Staff Squared is a SaaS web app that helps small to medium sized businesses better manage their people.

<comment><USER3> That makes sense I suppose. I note though that you still haven't described what the application actually does: 'better manage their people' could mean a lot of things. I'm sure you'll get to that though ;).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I prefer the green version but some of the elements are hard to read. If you could tone it down a little I think it would really stand out at first glance better than the white. The white, while it looks professional and beautifully done, seems generic to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm preferential to the white version.

It's easier for me to see the shades of gray than the shades of green. In particular, the pointing thing's eyes look funny and the ! above its head are just kind of strange. I don't know how to explain it other than that. In particular, I would ask if that contrast is visible to color blind individuals on the green page, or with a crappy monitor.

Maybe if you want a little more green on the white page make the video border green. I think that might give it some balance with the green below, since you have that filled box.

</comment><comment><USER6> I prefer the green version actually, I think it looks more 'designed' but I also think that 'caw' has a good point about color blind individuals. Also, the wording under Happy Staff = productive Staff doesn't stand out as well on the green. Personally, I am at the point in my own endeavor that I think we spend too much time second guessing ourselves when an A/B test can answer so many of our questions! You might try that.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Spelling mistakes lower trust ("Maketing")

2\. Stock photos disguised as clients lower trust.

3\. Homepage doesn't actually say what you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate your thoughts, you're absolutely right - I'm trying to nail the design and hadn't yet given enough though to the message the homepage conveys about our business.

<comment><USER7> Form follows function, not the other way round :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like green version. I do have an issue with what the service is. I would like to be able to see what the service is without watching the video.

There is a comment below about the same thing, but your marketing / copy should come before the design. That way you know exactly what to design.

but overall I think it's a great start.

</comment><comment><USER9> Count me also for the white version.

The contrast (for me at least) on the green one between the green section and the rest below is a bit jarring. The white one could maybe use a _little_ more colour on top but I do like it.

I think it's pretty damn nice though :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd liked white version.</comment>


Applications open for summer 2007 YC funding - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/summer07.html <comment><USER2> Why are you reluctant to accept one person companies? One person is often sufficient for a workable prototype. Others can join later. In fact, Y Combinator can act as a match maker of sorts, encouraging mergers among similar proposals/prototypes.

<comment><USER3> Amichail, I know exactly what you mean. Some people work better on their own. But even if you're looking for a founder, there are some places where you're out of luck. I go to the University of Virginia, and to tell you the truth, it's nearly impossible to find good hackers to work on startups with (even though 50% of Reddit went here). And without that, there's no hope getting into something as prestigious as the YCombinator.

I propose we make a simple site that allows hackers find one another, locally. A single hacker isn't going to make a Meetup group to find other hackers; that takes too much work. It should be more like Craigslist, but for this startup community. Sorted by city, people can exchange email addresses, screen names, and most importantly, ideas.

All it takes is two founders, and you never know what kind of matches people will find.

Granted, they should know that they can work together before taking on a huge project, but I think that something of this sort will really help people discover one another and get their startups going.

I'm not suggesting we re-invent Craigslist, but there are enough people here to merit something like this. Ruby on Rails, anybody?

<comment><USER4> Actually, why not do it here? I bet that sort of functionality could be integrated somehow into this site, and from Paul's first post to the group on the reasons for the site I think it would fit in well. Then again you won't be able to use Ruby...

<comment><USER5> yeah if we fill out the profiles - and add a location and status field. It'll work pretty well at first - as you can browse people's profiles to see if they are also looking for a co-founder etc. Things can then be taken up on email

<comment><USER3> Very good idea. We can assume most people here are in the startup community. So perhaps there should be a search by location field on a page here so that people can find each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone considered applying to YC 07 with the idea of creating another Y Combinator? Passing a Y Combinator to itself..

<comment><USER3> haha sounds like O(y) instead of O(n)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See http://ycombinator.com/s2007.html for details. The application form lives at http://news.ycombinator.com/apply. Probably time to make urls in comments turn into links.

<comment><USER7> If news.ycombinator.com is running on php, then the following code can be used to convert into links:

$Insert_Message = eregi_replace('(((f|ht){1}tp://)[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\\+.,~#?&//=]+)','\\\1', $Insert_Message); $Insert_Message = eregi_replace('([[:space:]()[{}])(www.[-a-zA-Z0-9@:%_\\+.,~#?&//=]+)','\\\1\\\2', $Insert_Message); $Insert_Message = eregi_replace('([_\\.0-9a-z-]+@([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+\\.)+[a-z]{2,3})','\\\1', $Insert_Message);

I hope that helps :) \- Jawad Shuaib

<comment><USER8> I'll bet when Arc is really ready that whole thing will take about 4 characters, right Paul? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best things I've learned from previous startup attempts is how to tell good product ideas from bad ones, and the difference between a good product and a good company. The bad news is that now I've weeded out all my own ideas.

I guess I won't be applying this summer.

<comment><USER7> I like Alex, Danielha, and notabel :) Keep up the great posts guys. Feel free to email/call me if any of you guys wish to discuss startups with a fellow entrepreneur. - firstname.lastname@example.com, 1-416-879-4659

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would love to apply to YC for my upcoming startup http://www.onista.com but YC had made it clear so many times that they do not like either "Single Founder" Or "Moonlighters" and unfortunately or fortunately I am both.

Not sure why YC guys think that way (May be they want to play safe bets) but I am on very well course to release my application "Onista" for public use in Summer Timeframe.

Honestly I do not even need the funding (Amount) that YC offers, but what would be great to have is their brand-name with my startup.

May be YC should start some category like "YC Certified Startup". Funding is not major worry here. I got that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Paul there seems to be a bug. I've been just entering some stuff in the application and it seems it forgets the answers that I entered for the last few questions. It also seems to be truncating answers. I entered 1 month and it truncated that to 1 mon. Is there a restriction to the length of the entire application?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you let me know precisely how to reproduce it? Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

<comment><USER11> For the question:

Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

I entered: Don't know

I can only see:

Don

I also tried Dont know

still only see Don

<comment><AUTHOR> This is weird. I believe you, but I can't reproduce it. Can you send me an email at email@example.com?

<comment><USER11> I tried it again and it seems to work fine. Thanks for looking at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there any way for someone from Europe to get a green card in US if he get funding from YC?

<comment><AUTHOR> IANL but I'm pretty sure YC funding is not enough. But I've heard there are ways to get into (or rather stay in) the US if you go on to raise larger amounts of funding.

<comment><USER13> IANAL either (although I do date one), and I too have heard of these things. I think they are called E-2 visas. They require you to raise or invest around $100k in a US business. The lawyer who told me about the E-2 was quick to warn that the applications get scrutinized hard. It sounded political, vaguely sketchy, expensive, and complicated.

<comment><USER14> it's kind of complicated, whatever process you choose. email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you want help. I'm from sweden and our company got funded by Y Combinator in November.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome. Been checking the site five times a day for months. :) BTW the ASCII application has a few dates off. Looks like a copy/paste issue from the last application.

<comment><USER15> Having been part of a few startups before, I it definately easier to do it with a partner(s). I'm currently doing my latest startup alone - but I dont' consider myself alone. I have two great programmers, even though they are working for me...I treat them like co-founders, we discuss everything not just technical issues, business model and even their love-lives! I'm also getting assistance from my network, people I've worked in the past with and people I've looked up to during my professional career. Each one of these guys have stepped up to mat and offered me guidance each step of the way. Some mentors I talk almost on a daily basis...I treat these guys like board members/quasi- founders also because without their guidance and support I'm sure it would be much harder. Startups are not built alone - they are built by teams...these teams are composed of people who may not be traditionally considered co- founders but I'd argue they are. So I respectively disagree with YCombinator shying away from one person startups - they really need to consider the entire infrastructure. (Sorry for the long post- Chandra)</comment></comment>


Google's top search result is Google - <AUTHOR> https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors <comment><USER2> Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from Google.

I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and that's what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me, these guys watch "the numbers" carefully.

<comment><USER3> Actually, on text translations, DeepL nowadays outclasses Google Translate IMHO. The only downside is that they don't appear to offer some kind of transparent website translate feature ("put a URL in and it translates the entire site, with layout kept intact"), at least not for free. But if I happen to have a paragraph or so in some foreign language and want that translated to some language I can understand, DeepL has become my first stop due to its consistently higher result quality.

<comment><USER4> I would be prepared to switch over completely for the languages they support if DeepL didn't insert their advertisement at the bottom of some results (I've had this accidentally included in an email before), and if they had a mobile app with a text selection action on Android to highlight text and see a popup with the translation. As it is, I use it most of the time but still rely on Google Translate being more accessible. Obviously DeepL is newer, so these limitations are understandable.

<comment><USER5> > if they had a mobile app with a text selection action on Android to > highlight text and see a popup with the translation

I've had the same frustration, so I've written a simple script/app with Tasker (and AutoShare plugin) to select text and translate from DE -> EN. I use it quite frequently to learn German.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _> A trending search in our data for "myocardial infarction" shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

\- Google's dictionary definition.

\- A "people also ask" box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.

\- A "knowledge panel," which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.

\- And a "related conditions" carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases._

I don't know, I'm conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the article is going for, but I think it's better exemplified by the fact that there's a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on search results.

This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. It's not emphasizing its own search results over "organic" search results, it's deemphasizing search results altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly tell what the "organic" source of the direct answer is.

I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which I care more about.

<comment><USER7> You like it in the myopic sense of the word. In the way you like a big cake that sits in front of you, even if eating that cake is going to be bad for your health.

Google's monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient in the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over time the result won't be something you like.

<comment><USER8> > Google's monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient > in the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over > time the result won't be something you like.

Amazon—which genuinely used to be a great and reliable shopping experience, and made a bunch of changes that _looked_ user focussed—is a great example of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Makes sense to me. Google Flights is amazing, Google Stocks is better than my broker (and way easier/faster), Translate doesn't even have a decent competitor, and Restaurants isn't perfect but just makes it easier to get to Google Maps.

As a consumer, this is great.

As a small business owner, I'm not very concerned about Google usurping pieces of my site into a widget. If the entirety of a business/site can be replaced with a free single-action widget, it's probably better for the consumer to do so.

If I were a big business (Expedia, Yelp, etc) affected by this, I would be more concerned about improving my product than a competitor simply copying functionality.

<comment><USER10> Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be good if nobody uses them.

Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS got antitrust for. Bundling their own maps app pre-installed on their dominant mobile OS

<comment><USER11> > ...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly

How is _promoting_ equivalent to _classic monopoly_? They are not removing competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.

<comment><USER10> they're promoting their own products when they have over 80% of search eyeballs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten worse.

For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search for 'mac shortcut screenshot' [https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for_mac_screenshot_shortcut_displays_the/)

It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the result.

Here's the result now: [https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png](https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png)

There's so much more cruft:

\- 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads

\- An extra URL

\- Multi-step instructions

\- Lots of extra words

\- Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently

Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's now changed into something else.

<comment><USER12> Turns out Google has been doing this for my own site on certain pages. If I search for:

devtools capture element screenshot

It has listed the exact instructions on the search results page: [https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png](https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png)

Can I get an outsider perspective, are those 4 list items shown in the rich snippet too many? Is it too wordy? I'm wondering if a single item which said:

Search for screenshot in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P)

Would be better?

<comment><USER13> I think it's fine. I'm not a webdev but I could follow your current instructions easily. I would definitely consider your instructions a good result if I was looking for the answer.

Although I prefer the second (wordier) example in OPs case anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Falls within the purview of their job of being an information-search tool I'd say.

There are times when I want a specific piece of information as quickly as possible and with as few clicks as possible, and other times I'm doing more exploratory searches, it seems google lets me do both pretty well.

<comment><USER15> Google doesn't bother showing the user results for his/her actual search terms anymore, and stuffs most of the page with AMP links and paid results... but it's not _them_ , it's _you_.

But if Google AI were really as bad at replacing simple grep they wouldn't be popular, etc etc.

<comment><USER16> Ye. It is really annoying that verbatim querries still are not quite verbatim. I get a feeling Google search index is just really an aggregate of a couple of 1000s big sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't recall Google ever promising to be a "pure" web search engine, just indexing all the pages.

Quite the opposite, they said the goal was to organize and present information. The goal has always been the most relevant information given the query. Early on, that pretty much always meant a web page. More and more, they already know the answer and can present it with a better UX for the user.

Why should they be required to be a "pure" index of web pages?

<comment><USER18> Similarly to Amazon replacing popular products with their own, Google is doing the same with search results.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure it's really the same. Someone asks Google "how far is it from Portland to Austin", and before they got 10 blue links, and now they get a number. That's not the same as "amazon, send me some Coke" and them sending Amazon brand cola drink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So maybe this is reasonable :)

(#2 was "Gogle")

<comment><USER20> Bing was launched in 2009. Where were you working in the year 2000?

<comment><USER19> I was at Microsoft, in MSN Search (which was later re-branded Bing). This was 2003.

<comment><USER21> The MSN brand had some good stuff. MSN messenger, the MSN browser (I loved it). Great work by that team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry but google flights have no competition. There is no better or more flexible and fast flight search than Google. No wonder why they won. Expedia should invest more in their flight search if they want to win.

<comment><USER23> "no competition" i guess you meant this figuratively. But in fact there is a ton of competition and the point of the article is that G is suppressing that competition by unfairly giving themselves the space which needs the least number of clicks to reach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love that "How Far Down Are the Traditional Search Results?" graphic.

</comment><comment><USER25> This reminds me of the recent news about Amazon, spying on partners products and then offering them. This is the end game for all platforms that control demand, slowly take more and more vertical integration to capture segments of larger value. This includes 'pure information' that they steal from publishers (and thus remove visits from the publisher) and normal verticals, like travel/shopping/tools/etc.

I'm not sure that these marketplaces / demand owners should be able to as they wield unfair power vs other vertical specific offerings.

</comment><comment><USER26> My own personal observations

\- The "rich results" do indeed save people a click

\- Some of them are excerpts from sites crawled by Google (that will tend to now be the 2nd result) that the user will no longer click on

\- Google's query disambiguation is the best in the business

\- They'd had a history of piggy backing on external resources and then turning them into their own, e.g. DMOZ, now wikipedia. I'm sure their knowledge ontology will soon render Wiki obsolete and push them down a result also.

\- They've taken some verticals and halved the number of clicks competitors or "price comparison" sites previously got, albeit it's their search engine, they lay it out as they see fit.

It's changed a lot since the "10 blue links". Most of us probably used to think of search engines as an agnostic finder of information on the web, with ads on top. Now with "query intent" and monetisation - the temptation is too much and it's not so much about finding information "out there", on the web.

Because of the position that Google is now in wrt their dominance in search markets and to the extent they can monetise a query, no one else can match their revenue per user or find alterative avenues of traffic that are comparable to their portal (i.e. Google in the UK commands 95% of searches, 80% of ad spend is between them and Facebook). If Google decides they want to enter a vertical, it's hugely detrimental to others in that market. Someone who ranked #1 10 years ago would get 50% of clicks, IIRC it's closer to 20% now, because of all the other media on the page.

But in the end, there are other choices. The problem is that due to the monetisation Google is capable of (based on a lot of data acquisition about their users), it's hard for anyone to carve out an alternative. Particularly so when Google pay phone vendors and browsers for them to be the default engine, it's a perpetuating cycle.

My personal ideal would be 5 or 6 independent search engines, with a number of meta engines built on top of those independent data sources;algos. Purely for the sake of getting alternative points of view and perhaps past any filters or bias.

</comment><comment><USER27> I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but...

1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google

2) Wouldn't you do the same? Keep in mind they're a public company and we know how incentives are aligned when you're a public company

<comment><USER28> The fact that it "makes sense" for companies to become evil monopolies when they are capable of doing so is a problem. It's like a big hole in our economic system where everything breaks down and grinds to a halt.

<comment><USER29> > The fact that it "makes sense" for companies to become evil monopolies when > they are capable of doing so is a problem

I'm no google fan but I don't think evil is an appropriate word nor would I call them a monopoly when it comes to search. There are plenty of other options out there from all over the world, the fact that they aren't that great isn't googles fault (and it would need to be for them to be considered a monopoly).

<comment><USER30> From the article: 9/10 searches in the US come from Google.

There are lots of great search engines. But when Google has the largest share of web analytics and can literally track you around the internet, how can other search engines who respect you as a user even have a chance? Give search engines a level playing field. Google is the default search engine on the most popular web browser. Google is the default search engine on the largest mobile operating system. Please stop defending Google. They have a monopoly on search, and its time for them to get the MS IE treatment.

<comment><USER31> When ATT was a monopoly, your choice for a phone provider, across the U.S, was ATT. There was no way to switch, and they used this power to raise prices (hurting the consumer is generally a requirement for anti-trust cases in the US).

It'll be very challenging to win a serious court case where the Google search monopoly could be conquered by a user typing bing.com at the top of the screen. Never before has a 'monopoly' been so easy to stop using.

<comment><USER28> Ah, but you don't understand where the monopoly is. It's on the other side: Businesses must support Google Search and run Google Ads to stay in business. It is effectively impossible to operate any business in the US without a Google presence.

<comment><USER31> >Ah, but you don't understand where the monopoly is. It's on the other side: Businesses must support Google Search and run Google Ads to stay in business. It is effectively impossible to operate any business in the US without a Google presence.

Citation? For one, I don't think Facebook uses Google ads.

<comment><USER28> That's an incredibly disingenuous response. I am sure you are perfectly capable of understanding what I said and how true it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tricky. It does feel anti-competitive but at the same time their info is usually also the best. So a strong argument can be made that it's 1 based on merit

<comment><USER33> You don't know if it's the best because there is no competition to discover better info. All other websites are presented with only 2 or 3 lines of text (search results) and have no free access to presentation forms that googles own content has.

</comment></comment><comment> baby-yoda Google (as well as Facebook) are becoming AOL 2.0 - users only know the service and not the mechanism or source. All info comes from G (or F). Syndicated or outright copied from all over the web but appearing with the "friendly, familiar and welcoming Logo our users know, love and trust" /s

</comment><comment><USER34> Search engines seem like they're subject to quantum mechanics, in that they're the observer that affects the state of the internet.

An internet without search engines was an internet without SEO, and without vast fortunes being spent on manipulating content to sell garbage. Launching "Backrub" in that environment must have seemed like an unalloyed good, but the very act of launching it turned out to have a profoundly negative impact on the web as a whole.

<comment><USER34> I guess I mean this as a semi-defense of Google, even though I don't like them and use DDG personally.

When doing a search on travel, what are the odds you get not-garbage in your results? Compare, say, 2000 to 2020. I can see a scenario in which Google was committed to providing open results, but those open results slowly became garbage, and they felt compelled to launch their own tool to ensure good results.

And sure, it puts profit in their pocket too, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would gladly pay for a search engine that actually did some things better than Google. Like say being better at finding [semi]exact phrases, especially longer ones. Something that focused on the long tail of search queries. Also, yes, I do feel like Google has gotten pretty bad for some normal queries. But this might as well be a function of the Internet/Web changing overall.

But I find this focus on Google's supposed moral infractions ridiculous. And then competitors popup that have a strictly worse products user-wise, but want to win by claiming higher moral ground. They don't fix any of the issues. I just don't see any of that taking off.

To date, I have not seen a single search engine that actually does something significant better. Not only that, pretty much all of them fail _miserably_ for anything more specific. This tells me Google is still absolutely on top of their game.

I like these widgets. Sometimes I even get annoyed when I WAS expecting it to popup but it wouldn't.

<comment><USER30> Privacy is a major feature. Morality is most definitely something a business can be better at. You can't just hand wave it away like it doesn't matter. DuckDuckGo might not give the best results, but I would trade that for privacy 10 times out of 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > How a search for "Linux" has changed. In 2000, Google only returned > "organic" results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is > full of Google products and "answers." Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org

Weird example to use in a screenshot since everything they show is a link to an external site.

</comment><comment><USER37> I feel Google has turned on its pledge of doing no evil. It is not shamelessly stealing publishers content and displaying it in the featured snippets. So the searcher has really no incentive of clicking on the search result anymore. He is getting all the information on Google itself.

<comment><USER38> Usually the snippets are outright crap. But this is the end result of SEO noise overwhelming signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Maybe, Google should be forced to create a separate tab for the knowledge graph and other tools. like they are doing it for images, the news, or videos. when I want to search the web, I want to search the web.

Because I see the issues with this. I also think those information have a value for users.

<comment><USER40> Maybe Google's search business and ad business should be broken up...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Google is removing the concept of urls and domains. Apps do this but so does not showing part of the URL in the URL bar and not showing the URL as it is in the result pages without the breadcrumb type redesign. They also realized they make more money when they show a favicon of websites to obfuscate the fact that they have to legally label Ads as ads. The ads txt is directly proportional to the size of the fav icon in serps. Google is evil.

Let's not forget how google reader and blogger were killed. The greater idea is to not remember anything and to go directly to google each time, making them the sole source of content.

</comment><comment><USER42> Because of the things cited in the article I spend less time in the Google search results page. I typically find the answer I'm looking for and get on with my day. Because I'm spending less time I actually use it more now.

Sometimes when I'm looking up stuff on how to do things physically like how to install a part in a car or fix something in my house I'll get a YouTube widget at the top which will take me to the exact moment in a video where what I'm looking for is being performed. This is magic to me. However Google is definitely promoting themselves in this case and I might not go anywhere past the very top of the search results page. Is this a bad thing?

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem here is that something that's useful for users (saving time with knowledge panels, question/answer lists, and suggested searches) also takes away clicks from other websites. Something can be both good for the user in the short-term (quicker answers) and bad for the user in the long term (fewer websites survive if clicks are diverted). We have the same issue with "ecosystems". It's great for the user that the Google Assistant can ring the Pixel phone if you don't know where it is. But it's one more feature that locks our smaller/independent competitors.

</comment><comment><USER44> Great study and presentation!

And an impressive website for a publisher. The average publisher is full of advertising, calls-to-action and several MBs weight of external scripts. This one is so simple, fast to load and clean. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER45> Amazon top search results? Surprise, Amazon-made products!

<comment><USER8> Not defending Amazon, but that's far from the default experience in my experience. Maybe I just search for a lot of specific thing Amazon doesn't sell themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> If anything I am searching can even remotely be considered a product or paid service, I get _an entire page, minus one link_ of links that have the [ad] box on them. And they're all shady 3rd party retailers. And when I want to find a product, to get the manufacturers website and product details, it's nowhere to be found. Just page upon page of [ad] links.

</comment><comment><USER47> This has been the case for a while and should not be surprising to anyone.

It's not terrible (Google's and Bing's promoted and internal modular results "above the fold" are often useful and relevant) but it does make it harder to use modern search portals to actually search the general web outside promoted results.

</comment><comment><USER48> Some of the answers in this thread actually allude to the bias in this study: People actively change their behaviors to accommodate Google's knowledge panels, meaning some portion of the "15000 top search queries" they studied are actually people seeking Google's results, not general search results.

</comment><comment><USER49> Good read! Also impressed by how the article page is designed/engineered. I wonder for a site like this how much of the content is hard coded and how much is made by tools / frameworks (the interactive scrolling box really looks like a hard-coded component for this article specifically)

</comment><comment><USER50> Who cares? Are they a non-profit? People who are offended by this have never run a business.

</comment><comment><USER51> It even leads to funny situations sometimes : [https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169](https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169)

<comment><USER52> To be fair, I think pagerank would naturally end up putting those results on top, since gmaps is the mapping service lots of people are linking to - especially if you're linking to a saved route or location, it's going to be a url to the google maps service as a whole that probably boosts its pagerank. It's definitely not a clear-cut "they decided to do this" scenario like the infoboxes and such that the article is complaining about.

<comment><USER20> PageRank wasn't natural. Google properities started with a score of 10. Google friends 5-9. Your site 0.

<comment><USER53> Source?

<comment><USER20> Lived through it. Microsoft had a 9. Anything list on the dmoz had a 4.

Page Rank doesn't work if the seeded values are all set to 0. If everyone started at 0 they pass on nothing. Google needed a way to seed. They assigned the highest value to themselves scaling down to other giants, universities, dmoz sites, etc.

Pagerank is a reputation calculator. You still need to define at least one cool person. Much better with thousands to varying degrees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Google Search is an information-search tool — and results often come as websites (the usual search result links), but also as widgets. Google can absolutely be the curator and a provider of information.

</comment><comment><USER55> A bit OT: can anyone recommend a good web-based OpenStreetMaps viewer with support for toggling multiple layers (e.g. topo, streets, satellite, political boundaries) and decent measuring tools?

<comment><USER56> There's a few MapCompare instances for showing many different maps: [https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/](https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Anyone have a recommendation for replacing hipmunk? I haven't found anything that shows as much information so visually and intuitively.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm surprised Google doesnt get sued for copyright infringement for large snippets that they include at the top of search results...

</comment><comment><USER59> I just want to say that the "Linux" search results now seem more relevant than they were in the past. Internet.com? Lol

</comment><comment><USER60> Google continues to abuse its market power, and the industry has not rebounded, despite the remedy.

</comment><comment><USER61> Separating search from content from services from advertising is starting to sound very appealing.

</comment><comment><USER41> Googles next five results? Surprise... Ads, pay to play

</comment><comment><USER62> Probably because a lot of boomers open browsers and initially type "google" into the top bar (which does a google search for "google") just to get to the actual google website...then search for w/e they actually want to search for.

</comment><comment><USER63> Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized.

It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent.

The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

<comment><USER64> Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?

<comment><USER61> That's both tired and inaccurate.

 _DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)._

[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/results/sources/v)

<comment><USER65> No, _this_ answer is tired and inaccurate. They successfully fool you into thinking they are much more complex than they really are. They use Bing and Bing alone for the SERP links (without this, you don't have a search engine) and their crawlers fill in the handful of "onebox" results for certain queries. They keep changing this statement but it used to say "multiple sources like Bing, Yahoo, Oath"... all of which are just Bing. It's Bing with a couple of add-ons. If Bing were to go away tomorrow, your beloved DDG would be done.

<comment><USER61> [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/results/du...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help- pages/results/duckduckbot/)

<comment><USER66> Only used for Instant Answers and widgets, as confirmed by your quote. All the actual search results are basically all Bing, again confirmed by the same quote from DDG themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Not really though. My top search result on most topics is usually Wikipedia. Maybe if you're searching for Google you find Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> FTA

> _How a search for "Linux" has changed. In 2000, Google only returned > "organic" results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is > full of Google products and "answers." Source: 2000 screenshot /Archive.org_

2000 screenshot: [https://mrkp-static- production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...](https://mrkp-static- production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search- before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2000.jpg)

2020 screenshot: [https://mrkp-static- production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...](https://mrkp-static- production.themarkup.org/graphics/google-search- before/1595892300303/assets/linux--2020.jpg)

<comment><USER64> I find Linux.org and Wikipedia. I must be in a helpful search bubble for people who want actual information instead of ads and news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> That's what happens when you have a monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER68> This is somewhat similar to the thread that I shared yesterday but nobody looked at it. Here is the link [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461)

</comment><comment><USER69> The problem is that website are commodities. The future for original high quality websites is that they should not allow search engines to crawl their content and slowly become a brand which people trust. Stop relying on search for traffic. Be an app, websites for marketing only.

Alternative new search engines are needed that allow for embedding/iframe/integration of global web search results in any 3rd party website free of cost. Then the new search engine should share ad revenue with the website that embeds their results+ads. Google does not allow that, but there is a real opportunity here. Embeddable global search engine that websites would like to integrate with.

A search engine that website would love to integrate. A search engine that websites would advertise themselves because they win too. Unlike the current scenario where only Google wins.

<comment><USER68> I never understood why websites are not personal property and why US gov. decided that anybody can crawl and scrape them at will and free of charge. That would be similar to someone crawling your house and making it fully visible and searchable to the global public . I guess Google Maps already did that.

My understanding is that .com (commerce) prevailed and people who have websites want to be fully public, visible and searchable.

On the other hand deep web and dark web exist but most of the people who use it and operate there do it because of shady business.

I don't entirely understand your search engine idea but if internet would start all over again I think the right model for search engine would be to have website owners submit their websites to the search engines along with metadata so searching experience becomes rich.

Metadata would be similar to something like Resource Description Framework [https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html](https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html)

<comment><USER69> > *I don't entirely understand your search engine idea

Does google allow for iframeing or customizing it's search results? No. A new search engine that has a API/plugin for 3rd party websites so that websites can integrate a global search engine into the website like google integrates websites' content into its instant answers. There is room for innovation here when 3rd party websites get creative in displaying global search results in different ways simple or complicated ways. If there are Ads in results, the website gets paid a % of the ad revenue that the search engine made due to the website embedding it's results.

Search engine's are high margin business, so they should be able to share 50% revenue with websites.

<comment><USER68> Ah ok I got it. I like your idea it is similar to my.

Currently what you can do as a website owner is to use Google Adsense ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AdSense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AdSense)) and then you are kind of sharing revenue with Google but only when someone visits and clicks Google Ad on your website.

<comment><USER69> > _Currently what you can do as a website owner is to use Google Adsense_

Nooo! This is not what I meant. I mean that embedding a search engine to your website without the user moving back to Google. So every website has a search engine for the entire internet. Not just Google. I want search to be kind of affiliate revenue to Amazon. So the developer embeds a search engine on the search page of a news website they get commission off the ads in a search result if the user decide to use search on the news paper's website. A search engine like Google for global search not just site-limited search.

Like do what Google is doing to websites but in reverse. Commoditize search. It'll require something more to get it right/product market fit but it's possible if you be creative.

Google is not the end product, its a compliment to websites. Websites need to commoditize Google instead of it being the other way around.

<comment><USER70> Imagine websites did this. Who would use it?

A search engine widget on website would probably look bad, would always be in different position and present a host of UX challenges which would add friction to adoption.

Every website is already able to search the internet via the URL bar of your browser nowadays. Its always there when you need it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/print-view/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see-20120504

<comment><USER2> He actually did a TED talk two months ago at TED2015. It's from 4 years after the article above was written, and it's one of those talks that leaves you with lingering thoughts for days afterward.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_nav...](https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_navigate_the_world?language=en)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. Daniel Kish's story is inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually tried to do this as a sighted kid. I got good enough fairly quickly to find the doorway in a dark room. Which might not seem like much, but it more or less removed my fear of the dark which is probably a useful thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion: (Batman)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908296)

A truly inspiring story.

</comment><comment><USER6> This kid has been doing it since age 7: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QaCeosUmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1QaCeosUmw)</comment>